>We NEED enforcement of the new rules(6ft, masks) because they're not being followed where I'm at.

How should those things be enforced in your opinion?

It might get tricky when you have home grown terrorists walking around with long guns shouting that it violates some right they think they have to not wear them.

With fines and jail time if necessary. OSHA can enforce in the workplace - it's quite literally their purview.

Deaths reported as COVID-19 in the US so far: 90,263

Deaths due to flu during the 2018-2019 flu season: 34,157

Deaths due to flu during the 2017-2018 flu season: 61,000

So with a particularly deadly flu season in 2017-2018, COVID-19 has already killed nearly as many people as 2 flu seasons combined.

There are also a lot of deaths that are likely caused by COVID-19 but haven't been attributed properly, for any number of reasons including not wanting to waste tests on people who are already dead. You can find a nice graphic here that expresses this phenomenon nicely using seasonal averages: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...

The stages of grief start with denial. Not gotten very far, have we?

I don't understand why people are believing this literal fake news, you can look at your state's official stats to see it's not true...

You might want to check your sources on that.

Citation?

I was thinking about this.

The easiest way would be to hire inspectors to go around and inspect places during business hours and close them down if they're not in compliance.

That or a federal jobs program of "safety enforcer" paid for by the fed and placed in every business of X size or whatever. The former seems more likely.

CDC: In the US, the flu has killed 12,000-61,000 per year over the last decade. According to the worldometer page, COVID19 has killed 91,000. Since January.

WHO: (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(...) Worldwide, flu causes 290,000 to 650,000 respiratory deaths. Worldometer reports 316,000 COVID19 deaths. Since January. And I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that is off on the low side. But it's still early.

> According to the worldometer page, COVID19 has killed 91,000. Since January.

Not quite. The first death in the US was Feb 29. On March 31, it was only 5151.

So ~91k deaths over 2.5 months, or ~86k deaths over 1.5 months. (...I'd probably go with the first just to encompass infection time)

If you're going to spout nonsense that runs counter to the government's official tally, at least cite your source.

Are you forgetting that US hospitals are marking people who are dying of alcohol poisoning and heart disease as Covid deaths? Even when they are not tested! (https://www.foxnews.com/media/physician-blasts-cdc-coronavir...)

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-... https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/14/candace-ow... https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medicare-hospitals-covid-p...

Many doctors think there's actually an undercount as they discover ways in which the disease can present differently than severe respiratory distress, or look at guidelines that may have led to incorrectly ruling out a case.

Of course, be sure to save some of that skepticism for ways in which a fee-for-service medical system can bend treatment large and small when this is all over.

And how would one pay for it?

California and Washington are both running massive deficits due to their harsh quarantine measures and will literally be out of money in a few months. Many cities are already running out of money.

Seattle, San Francisco, LA, NYC... all are heading towards bankruptcy or massive layoffs.

Many cops and teachers are about to be laid off. Prisons will be releasing prisoners to make budgets meet.

And here people are talking about a whole new squad of police that do nothing but enforce distancing and mask-wearing. With what money?

https://www.usmayors.org/2020/04/14/cities-report-pandemic-c...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-cities-...

https://www.dailybreeze.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-la-cities...

> And how would one pay for it?

This is like the old line about education ("if you think it's expensive, try ignorance").

There isn't any such thing as "ending lockdown" without certain cooperative measures. Either we'll take the necessary collective steps to control spread and coordinate recovery behavior... or we won't, and we'll have both the uncontrolled spread and the second order uncoordinated responses including large portions of people sitting out economic participation in order to manage personal risk.

Maybe it'll take some kind of civil enforcement to do this. Maybe most people will cooperate.

Maybe the federal government will lend local governments money to help. Or it won't, or it will, but will come with stipulations designed to weaken the ability of local institutions to act counter to partisan ends of those in control of the Senate and executive.

But anyone on team "end lockdown" should hope there is cooperation, and enough enforcement to encourage it at the margins. And if funding is a problem, then private and public entities alike at least in theory have some incentive to come up with a way to solve the problems that need to be solved to support higher levels of activity.

We also need testing to know when people are actually healthy, and not healthy-looking.

Where are you that testing is still a problem? At least here in AZ there is no wait to get any sort of test, and actually doctors are now just including them in the standard blood panels they do.

It's a major problem nationally in the US, and we've been lied to constantly about timelines on testing. Even if everybody on AZ who fits the current testing criteria can get a test, to be able to reopen safely we need to test lots of people who don't fit the current testing criteria. Wider testing criteria means more testing capacity required, which is an issue because we don't have that extra capacity and won't any time soon.

|At least here in AZ there is no wait to get any sort of test

False. People in AZ are waiting in their cars for hours to get tested.

Haha okay fair point. You do also have to “wait” in the office after you check into for a teeth cleaning, or “wait” after ordering your food at McDonald’s. That shouldn’t be used to indicate that these things are unavailable.

Also YMMV. I did not have to wait at all for my test. I made an appointment at sonoraquest labs (which I believe is part of lab corps) and I was the only person there at my slot other than the staff.

I did have to “wait” in the sense that I scheduled my appointment for the next day after calling them.

Can they test every employee at the start of work and every patron of every business. Can they do that in a fashion where those awaiting results are isolated such that they can't infect others if they are sick? Are people physically distancing themselves and properly wearing masks?

If the answer is no to any of those questions then there's not enough testing to help prevent the spread of disease. Seeing there's no meaningful herd immunity to the virus and no vaccine available if there's no controls on infections the hospitalization rate of the virus will overwhelm hospitals.

The reason for shutdown orders is to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. COVID-19 is really infectious and has a high hospitalization rate. These two factors combined can very quickly cause ICU resources to hit capacity. Once that happens people die at even higher rates than otherwise. A lot of people in Italy died because ICU resources hit capacity.

You can test a million people today but unless all of those people are quarantined from the rest of the population you'll need to test them again tomorrow as they may have become infected in the meantime. Even if COVID-19's mortality and hospitalization rate was low it's still a serious illness and mass infections would still shut businesses down. A majority of causes people are down for weeks with the disease. They're not going to be able to work so if you have a cluster at a meat packing plant it'll still be effectively shut down.

I still can’t buy a thermometer online.

Here: https://wyze.com/thermometer.html

I have one of these and have sanity checked it against another mouth thermometer I have from CVS and the readings agree with one another.

(There have been reports of Chinese-made thermometers lying about their readings)

Looks like there are also a bunch on amazon that will arrive to me anywhere between two days from now and a week from now.

Oh yes, I forgot about this one. It's about the only thing my state is doing fairly well at.

Or we can infect humans with human coronavirus to boost immunity against covid-19.